I put this together based on the old countertop in my kitchen that was probably built in the 1950’s or 60’s. It’s a seamless, repeatable texture that you can use however you choose. I left it transparent, so you’ll probably want to use the appearance panel to add a background color.

A strange problem with a relatively easy fix. Mac only, as far as I know.

If you ever open up Illustrator and instead of File, Edit, Object, etc… menus, you see something like “$$$/_MBAR/Mnu/VisibleMenuBar/” for each of the menus, it’s because unless you have the ME (Middle Eastern) version of Illustrator, there are a few languages Illustrator just can’t handle. Hebrew and Arabic. They can’t even be on the list.

Easy to do in InDesign, but not so much in Illustrator. It’ll probably be in CS6 (though I’ve been thinking that for quite a few versions now)

Anyhow, it actually is pretty easy to do in Illustrator, just not as straight forward. You need to use the power of the appearance panel (which you can read more about here, here and here) and you won’t technically be putting a gradient on a stroke so much as you’ll be making a fill behave as a stroke and giving that fill a gradient fill. Yeap.

Sometimes you have reason to hide the points of your object. Maybe you’re making changes to your stroke width, maybe you’re adding a subtle effect, maybe you just find the selection color to be distracting.

The bounding box is the part of the move tool (V, the black arrow) that allows you to resize your entire object as opposed to one point at a time. It can get turned off by mistake sometimes leaving you wondering why you can’t resize objects.